Employment trends and contract resource hiring in Fortune 500 companies

Moore (2007) argues that contract workers are a growing trend in business, even for skilled jobs. This presents challenges for team-building, for a number of reasons. This paper will outline some of those reasons and will discuss ways to address this problem.

The use of skilled contract workers is rising because of changes in the ways that workers see their employment experience, and in turn there are some reasons for companies to use such labor as well, including lowering their fixed labor costs. There are a number of challenges that arise from this arrangement. The first is that the organizational culture becomes harder to establish with these workers. On a specific project, that might be less important because each project has its own culture, but there are instances where it is beneficial for contract workers to have the same high level of culture buy-in as full-time workers. Having a consistent, coherent organizational culture allows for employees to have a shared mission, to feel as part of something bigger than themselves, and can be a source of motivation. When the motivation for a contract employee is a paycheck and something for the CV, these objectives are not necessarily congruent with the objectives of the hiring company.

Thomas (no date) notes, however, that much of team-building does not relate to developing a coherent organizational culture. Teams, he notes, can be motivated when managers pay attention to their individual needs, orient rewards towards the team objectives, and set realistic, challenging targets. Teambuilding, therefore, is not dependent on the team members being full-time employees. Indeed, companies may find it easier to orient employees to specific objectives if the employees are only temporary -- those objectives become much clearer in the context of a project.

As Williams (2006) notes, the role of leadership does not change on the basis of the employment statuses of the team members. Leadership involves "underwriting talents, energy and commitment of others, in order to put talent where it can be used to optimum effect." This is basically the concept of servant leadership. For work that is project-specific in particular, it should not matter where the team members come from, only that they are committed to the team, committed to the project and are guided by talented, informed leadership.

The same can be said about performance management. From the standpoint of any individual employee, contract or not, performance management should begin with the establishment of objectives, and then a measure of whether or not the worker has met those objectives. This should not change depending on the employment status of the worker. What does change is the HR department's approach to the issue of performance management, which becomes a little bit more complex. HR departments are forced to see employees as having two specifically different types -- project workers and program workers. The implication is that performance management might be taken out of HR's hands, or that HR will need to work more closely with project managers to develop adequate tools and measures for performance management of team members, regardless of where those workers come from.